


At Home in the City of Outliers

by Schalakitty



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is a Good Boyfriend, Character Study, Fluff, M/M, spoilers for Condos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schalakitty/pseuds/Schalakitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos reflects on how lucky he is and buys a thoughtful house-warming gift. (Spoilers for Condos)</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Home in the City of Outliers

**Author's Note:**

> So I may have given in and watched the leaked clips from the taping of Condos. And I may have utterly fallen for everything they did with Carlos from Dylan Marron being adorable in the role to the new dialogue shedding so much more light on the character’s worldview and philosophy. And I may have needed to excise all these intense feels in a mini-fic.

He is well aware of his status as a statistical minority if not an outright outlier. Speaking specifically within the US – Ethnicity: 16.90%, Number of Languages Spoken Fluently: 9.03%, Industry of Employment: 6.16%, Religious Affiliation: 3.30%, Educational Attainment: 3.07%, Sexual Orientation: 1.75%… Based on just these facts alone his chances of existence are 0.0000005537057526% (5.537057526E-009% if you wanted to clean it up in scientific notation).

As Cecil would say, his existence is not impossible, but it’s also not very likely.

But Night Vale is a city of outliers and impossibilities. Where so long as there is a the slimmest chance of something existing – out to either the 10th or 1,000,000,000th decimal place – it can and most likely does exist. Which is equal parts exciting and terrifying on the average day, though the exact ratio varies within one standard deviation of the mean most days.

And it is a place where he has found love. The love of a man who can weave words together into captivating tapestries but loses all that suave charm the moment Carlos smiles at him. A man whose presence floods his neural pathways with a dangerous mix of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. A man who is part of a city that accepts him as he is, even if he’s not always completely understood.

Carlos is accustomed to not being understood. He doesn’t want to use the term “dumb it down” because that language is problematic for many reasons and ignores all the different types of intelligences that people possess. But he is accustomed to adjusting the way he speaks to people since so few think the way he does. He ends up feeling boxed in by the way most people experience the universe around them, how they make it so small and cramped, and so often edit out anything that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of how things should be. To be honest, he was at least partially guilty of the same crime when he first arrived in this strange and wonderful city but having every previous paradigm shifted has only changed him for the better.

Here in Night Vale, he can talk about his thoughts on time and space and Cecil will not only listen but fawn over his words. Its the first time he has ever been able to talk about the beauty of how their very atoms are the scattered, fragmented remnants of long dead stars and the wonder of knowing their existences traverse dimensions that can’t be fathomed on a macro scale but are present nonetheless… and have it considered to be pillow talk.

A singular scientifically interesting place with a singular amazing man. That is where he found home.

When they finally find a space to call their own – a space with windows and doors and walls that fits the hopes they have for their shared future – Carlos has something ready to hang on one of those the walls. At first glance, it seems to be a piece of abstract art, made up of lines of various saturations and brightnesses of the same hue. Overall, it’s variations of magenta – a color which doesn’t actually exist save as a way for the human mind to make sense of a gap in the spectrum and thus very appropriate for decorating in Night Vale - and looks intensely colorful against the basic beige wall. “So, what do you think?” He asks Cecil once it is hung.

“I like it,” he replies after careful consideration. “I don’t know what it is exactly, but you picked it so I like it on principle.”

Giving it the slightest nudge (barely a single degree) to correct the leveling, Carlos explains, “It’s a portrait of us.” When Cecil just looks puzzled, he continues, “It’s a DNA portrait – a visual representation of what makes us _us_ , with you as the top half and me as the bottom. I sent in samples to a company and they made this print for us as a little house-warming present.”

The realization dawns on Cecil, his smile growing brighter like the first rays of sunlight rounding the curvature of the Earth. Touching the canvas with utter reverence, he murmurs, “So this is everything that makes you my dear Carlos.”

Coming up beside him, he places his hand on the canvas well. “Somewhere in here are the alleles that give me my ‘perfect hair and perfect teeth’ as you call them,” Carlos notes with a touch of humor. “It also contains markers for the various Y-Chromosome Haplogroups that make up your incredibly interesting ancestry. Even the epi-marks that make us attracted to one another. It’s all right here in this picture.”

Cecil lays his hand over his boyfriend’s, not yet pulling back from the canvas’ surface just yet. “I love you,” he whispers, the words so soft and intimate when spoken in a quiet living room full of packed boxes compared to into a microphone.

And Carlos takes a deep breath and finds that he doesn’t have to over think things or abstract them to the point that he can cope with the intensity of his feelings. That here he can truly be at ease and honest with his whole 1 in 7,132,353,157 self and be appreciated for it. That fact – that actual real solid fact - makes it all so easy to answer in kind, “I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> The stats listed are for being Hispanic, Bilingual, Employed in a STEM field, Agnostic, PhD recipient, and Gay. Ethnicity, religion, and educational attainment numbers come from the Census Bureau while I got the employment one from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bilingual one from a Scientific American article, and the LGBT+ one from the Williams Institute. I added decimals to the Bilingual and Employment ones to make them match the rest.
> 
> [DNA portraits are a real thing that exists and they are beautiful.](http://www.dna11.com/dna-images-gallery)
> 
> World population number taken from the [Population Clock](http://www.census.gov/popclock/) at the time of posting.
> 
> Thank you to [Caariosamu](http://caariosamu.tumblr.com/) for beta reading this and helping me spruce up a few things.
> 
> Feel free to stop by my blog [SchalaHasFun.Tumblr.Com](http://schalahasfun.tumblr.com) for more fandom goodness.


End file.
